Marriage Matters: Counting down to New Toy Liberation Day

The first decorations dug out of Christmas boxes in the Burg household every year are the Advent calendars.

By James and Audora Burg

The first decorations dug out of Christmas boxes in the Burg household every year are the Advent calendars.

One is a fabric wall-hanging, where an appliquéd Christmas tree awaits its daily application of one of the Velcro-backed ornaments that rest in the 24 pockets below.

The other is a lovingly-made wooden Nativity puzzle, where day by day, the scene takes shape as animals and people are added to the beautiful vignette.

Both help our impatient Burglets pass the seemingly interminable days until New Toy Liberation Day arrives.

One year even those two time-markers were not enough to get our kids through the waiting-for-Christmas gauntlet, maybe because our kids began actively waiting for Dec. 25 in November. That year, they also made paper count-down chains, where every day they would tear off another loop.

The chain, with its 50-something links, wound up, around, and back down an interior doorway.

Watching them chafe at time’s slow passage made us realize the children’s classic query “Are we there yet?” is not limited to car rides.

Yes, in similar situations, we too would like to be “there,” wherever there happens to be, but as adults, we are more likely to focus our attention on a different metric: “Are we making progress with wherever we are going?”

It seems to be a human need to feel movement, or progress, however minimal – in other words, to not feel stuck.

How else to explain the behavior during traffic jam-ups on the freeway, when one is presented an opportunity to take an exit ramp to detour around the congestion? When we have been in that situation, we breathed sighs of relief as we exited.

We don’t know if we saved any time as we put on more miles in a detour. By that point, it did not matter, because it was no longer about efficiency, but about escaping the frustration of feeling stuck.

In marriage, at times we feel like we are waiting to get somewhere; sometimes that place has shape or form, but at other times it is just a nebulous feeling of unfulfilled anticipation.

In these cases, we feel like our children, where that sense of anticipation starts out exciting and wonderful, but after a while, the waiting brings irritability and annoyance. When this happens, what was beautiful and worth anticipating becomes resented.

Breaking out of this negative place involves a form of perpetual dialogue, talking to release the pent-up waiting. It is different than being crabby: it is sharing rather than venting, commiserating rather than attacking.

Talking about where we fall short of our dreams and goals is not a signal of a bad relationship, it is walking in love with each other.

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer.